The number of Worcester charters preserved to us in some form or other from the earliest days down to the time of St Oswald's accession is considerably over a hundred. In sixteen of these we find a mention of the church or monastery of St Mary. Each of these charters must be dealt with separately in order to determine its claim to authenticity.[1] The result of such an examination will show that not one of them is trustworthy, so far at least as its reference to St Mary's church is concerned. One or two examples may here be given to show how the mention of St Mary's has come in.
The earliest charter which mentions St Mary's is B. C. S. 165, a grant of King Æthilbald, the bounds of which are dated 743. Before the signature comes the statement that this grant was made over afterwards to the monastery of St Mary of Worcester. This was evidently a note written on the charter at a later date, and copied in course of time as though it had been part of the original.
Another example of subsequent modification is B. C. S. 233, which is not strictly a charter, but a record of a grant by King Offa, who as spoken of in the third person. Here it is said that 'King Offa granted to the monks of the church of St Mary of Worcester' a certain property. A Saxon record of the same grant follows, which says nothing of monks or of St Mary, but records the gift as 'to the minster at Worcester for the use of the brethren'. The Latin record may have been written at a very much later date than the charter of which presumably it was a summary.
Again, B. C. S. 577 and 578 are two forms of grants said to have been made by King Alfred; but it is only the second and inferior form which speaks of 'the church of St Mary of Worcester'; the other form has simply 'the church of Worcester'.
Before we come to the consideration of the changes introduced at Worcester by St Oswald, it is desirable that we should learn something of the saint's earlier days. Our source of information is the anonymous Life of St Oswald, published by Raine in the Rolls Series (Historians of York, i. 399 ff.) from the Cotton MS., Nero E 1. As the biographer appeals to Archbishop Ælfric as a witness to the miracles performed at the tomb of King Edward the Martyr, he would seem to have written before that archbishop's death in 1005; and as he quotes the earliest Life of St Dunstan, which was dedicated to the same archbishop, we may perhaps date his work between 1000 and 1005. Oswald had died in 992, and his biographer was a monk of Ramsey, Oswald's greatest foundation.[2]
- ↑ See Appendix A.
- ↑ On this anonymous Life see further in Appendix C
